Tag: in-the-news

Donald Trump began his presidency by asserting, based on “alternative facts,” that he had attracted “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” He is ending his presidency by averring that Saturday’s pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., attracted more than 1 million people. And just as he claimed that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 if it weren’t for “the millions of people who voted illegally,” he is now insisting that the Democrats stole this year’s presidential election by altering “millions of ballots.”

These are fitting bookends for a president who often seems to live in a parallel universe shaped by his ego’s demands. While Trump’s fantasies about massive election fraud may be more consequential than his fictitious crowd numbers, both kinds of misrepresentations reflect his need to twist reality into grotesque but self-flattering shapes. While that tendency is often amusing, it is also more than a little disturbing to anyone who thinks truth should count for something in political debates.

The president’s endorsement of the claim that “more than a MILLION people showed up to support this President” took the form of a retweet. But White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany made the same claim directly. “AMAZING!” she tweeted on Saturday. “More than one MILLION marchers for President @realDonaldTrump descend on the swamp in support.”

It would indeed be amazing, if it were true. Trump himself put the size of the crowd in the “hundreds of thousands” later the same day. But he also said “tens of thousands.” The Washington Post said McEnany was “vastly exaggerating the crowd size.” The Post put the number of participants in the “thousands,” as did The New York Times and Fox News. USA Today went with “tens of thousands.” So did conservative columnist Miranda Devine in a New York Post piece declaring the victory of “Trumpism.” Voice of America reported that “it is not clear how many people turned up in Washington, and the city’s police department does not estimate crowd sizes.”

According to ridership data from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, rail use was slightly higher on the day of the rally than it was the previous Saturday (80,000 vs. 77,000), while bus use was slightly lower (137,000 vs. 142,000). Those numbers would not capture people who drove in for the rally and then drove out without using public transit. But “more than one MILLION” visitors, or even “hundreds of thousands,” should have had a more noticeable impact on transit use, especially since parking was restricted ahead of time.

Although there is a big difference between “tens of thousands” and “more than a MILLION,” Trump has embraced both estimates. But as with his claims about election fraud—the main motivation for Saturday’s rally—many of his supporters seem to think actual numbers are less important than the sentiment underlying them.

“You just had to see the enthusiastic cheer of tens of thousands of pro-Trump protesters who flocked to Washington, DC, over the weekend to understand it doesn’t really matter what the final electoral vote tally is: Trumpism has won,” Devine writes. “Even if, as seems probable, Joe Biden ends up living in the White House, and inviting his son Hunter to dinner with new business prospects from China, the corrupt bipartisan globalist establishment is not back in the ascendancy.”

Doesn’t it sort of matter whether Biden was duly elected president or, as Trump still maintains, stole the election through a massive criminal conspiracy? “Even if there was no skulduggery, the Trump campaign lawsuits come to nothing and the Dominion voting machines and their suspicious-sounding software get a clean bill of health, it’s a service to public trust for the Trump campaign to go through a process that is legal and accounted for within the Constitution,” DeVine says. “If there has been no fraud or miscounting, then public faith will be restored in the integrity of our elections going forward. That is a good thing which Biden should embrace if he really believes in unity and healing.”

Yet the president is hardly serving the cause of “unity and healing” by asserting, over and over again without evidence, that he actually won the election, which according to him was “rigged” by systematic fraud involving “millions of ballots.” Whether or not that’s true is of more than passing interest to Americans concerned about “the integrity of our elections.” And if it’s not true, what does that say about a man who would casually engage in such reckless accusations? Whatever you may think of “the corrupt bipartisan globalist establishment,” the fabulism that is inseparable from Trumpism makes it impossible to have a meaningful discussion about that subject, or anything else.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3lGuV31
via IFTTT

Class 25: Equal Protection IV: Sex Discrimination

• Frontiero v. Richardson (1107-1114)
• Craig v. Boren (1114-1119)
• United States v. Virginia (1119-1133)

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2K7e9fu
via IFTTT

The ordinance:

Speakers [during the public comment period] shall observe the commonly accepted rules of courtesy, decorum, dignity and good taste and shall not use foul language, display unacceptable behavior, or be disruptive of the proceedings….

Any person making offensive, insulting, threatening, insolent, slanderous or obscene remarks or gestures, or who become boisterous, or who makes threats against any person or against public order, and security while in the Board Room, either while speaking at the podium or as a member of the audience, shall be forthwith removed at the direction of the presiding office.

Any person removed from a public meeting at the direction of the presiding officer may be charged with disorderly conduct in accordance with New York State Penal Law Section 240.20.

Judge Gary R. Brown (E.D.N.Y.) concluded that this violated speakers’ rights, largely because many of the terms were unconstitutionally vague. If this were a moot court problem, the judge mentioned, it would be condemned as too easy. (I’m paraphrasing here, based on what I heard at the argument.)

I think a clearer rule might well be constitutional; a public comment period at a meeting is generally viewed as a “limited public forum,” where reasonable, viewpoint-neutral restrictions are permissible. It’s possible that a flat ban on the use of vulgarities, for instance, might be constitutional. (Truly threatening remarks, of course, can also be banned, and can indeed be criminalized in general, not just in a limited public forum.)

But this set of restrictions, the court held, didn’t qualify; the court therefore issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the ordinance. If a written order is issued, I’ll add a link.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/36JKWif
via IFTTT

So voters repudiate President Donald Trump yet refuse to embrace the Democratic Party, while also passing some freedom-friendly ballot initiatives. Meanwhile, the noisy center of American politics these past five years characteristically refuses to concede, and concocts increasingly implausible conspiracy theories attempting to explain away his loss. Where does that leave the modern GOP, and whatever vaguely libertarian muscle memory it may have buried somewhere?

That discussion takes up the second half of this week’s Reason Roundtable. The front end is devoted to exploring the difference between Trump’s and Joe Biden’s COVID-19 policies, the wonderful news of another vaccine, and the less salutary news of widespread infection and hospitalization increases all around the country. The phrase “Gadsden Flag mankini” is invoked.

Speaking of which: Got questions for Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward? Please email them to podcasts@reason.com before December 1, and we will try to get to each and every one of them during our annual Webathon, which begins at the end of this month. You’ll be glad you did!

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Music: “Day Bird” by Broke for Free

Relevant links from the show:

“Moderna’s Preliminary Results Indicate That Its COVID-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective,” by Ronald Bailey

“Masks Are a Tool, Not a Panacea,” by Ronald Bailey

“Trump Touts Operation Warp Speed’s COVID-19 Successes,” by Ronald Bailey

“Biden Has a Plan for a New National ‘Supply Commander,’” by Max Gulker

“New York, Shamefully, on the Verge of Shuttering Public Schools,” by Matt Welch

“Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Death Forecast Looks Less Plausible Every Day,” by Jacob Sullum

“Here Come the New Lockdowns,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New COVID-19 Restrictions on Private Home Gatherings Violate Personal Liberty,” by Robby Soave

“Will Biden Use the Broad Pandemic-Fighting Powers Originally Claimed by Trump?” by Christian Britschgi

“Don’t Buy the Debunked Dominion Voting Machine Conspiracy Theory,” by Eric Boehm

“The Supreme Court Won’t Save Trump,” by Damon Root

“‘I Won the Election,’ Tweets Trump as Legal Losses Stack Up,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“No, Trump Did Not Concede the Election (Even Briefly),” by Jacob Sullum

“California Voters Rebuked Their Governor, Legislators at the Ballot Box,” by Steven Greenhut

“Trump Lost in Part Because 2016 Third-Party Voters Heavily Preferred Biden,” by Matt Welch

“Mike Pompeo Jokes, Hopefully, About ‘a Smooth Transition To a Second Trump Administration,’” by Christian Britschgi

“Would a Less-Nativist Republican Have Won in 2020?” by Shikha Dalmia

“Before Drug Prohibition, There Was the War on Calico,” by Virginia Postrel

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3pzWttd
via IFTTT

Before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there was Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man who a white police officer shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Brown’s death helped fuel the fledgling Black Lives Matter movement, a response to the too often ignored problem of police violence in black communities.

In contrast to other police killings that have energized Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests—including that of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot while wielding a plastic gun; of Eric Garner, who died while an officer held him in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes; and of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that there’s no reason to believe that by shooting Brown, Wilson was acting unreasonably, because Wilson was under attack.

“Hands Up. Don’t Shoot,” a line derived from accounts of Brown’s final words, has been a rallying cry at protests against police violence. But Michael Brown is unlikely to have spoken those words. An exhaustive Department of Justice report concluded that the claim that “Brown held his hands up in clear surrender” came from sources who later “acknowledged that they didn’t actually witness the shooting, but rather repeated what others told them.” And that account was “inconsistent with the physical evidence,” which instead corroborated Officer Darren Wilson’s claim that Brown attacked him and tried to grab his gun. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum concluded in 2015, “Wilson’s use of deadly force probably was legally justified.”

Writer and filmmaker Shelby Steele went to Ferguson to investigate the meaning of Brown’s death and the reaction that it inspired. His new documentary, a collaboration with his son Eli, is called What Killed Michael Brown?

Born in Chicago in 1946, Steele, a former college professor who specialized in Russian literature, is the son of a truck driver and the grandson of a slave. His views on how to correct America’s racial injustices were deeply influenced by his experiences in the late 1960s and early ’70s working in a poverty program in East St. Louis. Steele believes, provocatively, that what killed Michael Brown is the “liberalism that put him in public housing, that expanded welfare payments so that his family broke up, the fatherless home, the terrible education, terrible schools, terrible public housing, uh, the destructive school busing.” In place of today’s increasing focus on identity politics, Steele believes we need to emphasize citizenship and the experiences we have in common if we are to deliver fully on America’s promise as a land of opportunity.

Listen to the full podcast interview here.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by John Osterhoudt. Additional graphics by Isaac Reese.

Music: “Calling (Instrumental),” by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License

Photos: Everett Collection/Newscom; Emilee Mcgovern/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John Rudoff/Polaris/Newscom; Javier Galeano/Polaris/Newscom; Imagespace/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Seth Herald/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Stephanie Keith/Polaris/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Nigro/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Imagespace/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Circa Images/Newscom; Joe Brusky/Flickr/Creative Commons; Elvert Barnes/Flickr/Creative Commons; Tim Dennell/Flickr/Creatives Commons; Joe Brusky/Flickr/Creative Commons; Fibonacci Blue/Flickr/Creative Commons; GPA Photo Archive/Flickr/Creative Commons

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/32OSWxv
via IFTTT

Big Sky. ABC. Tuesday, November 17, 10 p.m.

A few weeks back, in a review of HBO’s The Undoing, I wrote of David E. Kelley’s “amazing transformation” from the ratings-restrained world of broadcast television to cable, where he’s turned out a string of intelligent and exciting suspense series unequaled by any another producer I can think of in the history of the medium.” It seems I was a little premature—not about The Undoing, which is a brilliant piece of work—but about Kelley’s ability to work within the constraints of broadcast TV. Big Sky, his new ABC series, is a muzzle-velocity suspense drama that’s easily the best broadcast show of 2020.

Unlike Kelley’s other recent works, which use violence as a lens to refract class conflict (The Undoing and HBO’s Big Little Lies) or aging and redemption (the now-defunct Audience Network’s Mr. Mercedes trilogy), Big Sky is an unadorned crime thriller that goes straight for the throat.

A couple of teenage sisters on a road trip to visit a boyfriend are snatched off a remote stretch of Montana highway by men whose appetites fall somewhere between those of Hannibal Lecter and the Marquis de Sade. A team of ex-cop private investigators with a personal connection to the missing girls swings into action before the thinly stretched local law enforcement and quickly discover the abductions are not a one-off crime but part of a years-old pattern.

Shots are fired, Tasers are zapped, tables are turned, genders are bent, and stomachs are twisted. With echoes of Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and the old Steven Spielberg film Duel, Big Sky is a wild, fast and contorted ride that leaves its audience gasping—sometimes for breath, sometimes to control gag reflexes.

For all the action, it’s the writing that makes Big Sky sing. Kelley has taken a bunch of hopelessly cliched characters and made them sing. Jerrie Kennedy (played by former makeup artist Jesse James Keitel) divides her time between gigs as a country singer and a truck stop hooker (or “human relations,” as she calls it). The teenage Sullivan sisters Danielle (Natalie Alyn Lind, The Goldbergs) and Grace (Jade Pettyjohn, Little Fires Everywhere) have allowed genetics to define their relationship. “I got the good judgment,” says Grace. “You got the boobs.” Adds Danielle, reprovingly: “And the butt.”

Long-haul driver Ronald Pergman (Brian Geraghty, Chicago PD) grates under his mother’s complaints that when her friends brag about their lawyer and doctor kids, her only reply is that her 40-ish live-at-home son “drives a really big truck.” Retorts Ronald, sounding like a Peterbilt version of Milton Friedman: “This country’s in a supply-chain crisis. The trucker is today’s American hero.” Glad-handing highway patrolman Rick Legarski (John Carroll Lynch, The Americans) turns broody when the subject of his wife and her “menopause talk at the dinner table” comes up. And the private investigators (Katheryn Winnick of Vikings, Kylie Bunbury of Pitch and Ryan Phillippe), all former cops chased off for breaking rules, are no more adept at following the regulations on office romances in their new firm. Big Sky has plenty of bang-bang and vroom-vroom, but even when the noise level drops, the interest level doesn’t.

If you like these characters, you may be seeing a lot of them. Many of them  recur throughout the 20 or so books of best-selling Wyoming novelist C.J. Box, whose The Highway was the source of Big Sky. I don’t know Box’s work, but he’s apparently touched a nerve in Hollywood—four of his other books are under option for films or TV series. Be careful who you kill off, Mr. Box. You may need some of these guys later.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3lEMLU1
via IFTTT

As the surge in newly identified COVID-19 cases continues, state and local governments across the country are responding by imposing new restrictions on social and economic activity. With a few exceptions, the rules so far are not as sweeping as the lockdowns that all but a few states imposed last spring, when far fewer cases were reported but the number of daily deaths was twice as high. But now as then, many of the distinctions drawn by politicians make little scientific sense.

As of yesterday, according to Worldometer’s tallies, the seven-day average of newly confirmed infections in the United States was more than 152,000. That is more than four times the average on September 12, which was already slightly higher than last spring’s peak.

Since virus testing has expanded dramatically over the course of the epidemic, from fewer than 50,000 tests a day in early April to around 1.5 million a day recently, comparisons between the spring and fall are misleading. But the recent spike in daily new cases is clearly much larger than expanded testing can explain, and the percentage of tests that detect the coronavirus has more than doubled during the last month, from a seven-day average of 4 percent in mid-October to nearly 10 percent now.

Hospitalizations are also on the rise. According to the COVID Tracking Project, nearly 70,000 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized in the United States yesterday, up from fewer than 29,000 on September 20. That is significantly higher than the previous peaks of about 60,000 seen in April and July.

Increases in COVID-19 fatalities so far have been less dramatic, even allowing for the typical lag between laboratory confirmation and death. As of yesterday, the seven-day average of daily deaths, per Worldometer, was 1,156, up 64 percent from the recent low on October 17.

The case fatality rate (deaths as a share of confirmed infections) has fallen from more than 6 percent in mid-May to 2.3 percent as of yesterday. In other words, COVID-19 patients, even when hospitalized, are much less likely to die from the disease today than was the case in the spring. That downward trend probably has been driven by several factors, including ramped-up testing that identifies milder cases, a younger and healthier mix of patients, and improved treatment.

What does all this mean for how many Americans ultimately will die from COVID-19 by the time effective vaccines are widely available? It seems clear that President-elect Joe Biden was excessively pessimistic when he predicted last month that we would see another 200,000 deaths, or a total of around 423,000, by the end of the year. The “ensemble forecast” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), based on projections from “45 modeling groups,” puts the death toll at 260,000 to 282,000 by December 5. Based on the upper value from the CDC’s forecast, Biden’s projection implies a death toll of more than 5,400 a day during the last 26 days of December, which is 4.7 times the current average and 2.4 times the April peak.

By contrast, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, yesterday told CNN’s Jake Tapper “it is possible” that the death toll will be in the neighborhood of 439,000 by March 1, as currently projected by the the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. But Fauci added:

The models, as I have said so often, are as good as the assumptions you put into the model. And we have got to change those assumptions. We have got to say, we are going to turn it around [by] very, very vigorously adhering to the public health measures. And we don’t need to get to that number.

That is a model number if we act in a certain way. We can turn that around, that plus the fact that we are going to start getting doses of vaccines available for the highest-priority individuals sometime in mid-to-late December.

And then, as we get into January, we will get more vaccine doses available. I think, when we put those two things together, vaccine plus strong adherence to the fundamental public health measures, we can blunt that. We don’t have to accept those large numbers that are so terrifying.

What does “very vigorously adhering to the public health measures” mean? One interpretation is that it means taking all the familiar precautions, such as avoiding crowds, limiting travel and social interaction, working at home when feasible, maintaining physical distance, and wearing face masks when you are indoors in close proximity to strangers. Another interpretation, increasingly favored by politicians, is that “turn[ing] it around” requires new legal mandates.

The legal restrictions imposed this fall cover a wide range, from mask mandates to renewed lockdowns. But in many cases, governors and mayors do not seem to have learned much from the bitterness and defiance engendered by last spring’s restrictions, which were often arbitrary and hard to square with what we know about the coronavirus.

Beginning today in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is imposing a two-week lockdown, meaning that residents are once again instructed to stay home except for “essential” activities, restaurants will be limited to takeout and delivery, and “nonessential” businesses such as gyms, salons, and casinos must close. Grisham’s order also applies to outdoor venues such as state parks and golf courses, even though the risk of virus transmission in those settings is much lower. She also has imposed new capacity limits on supermarkets and big-box retailers.

Compared to Grisham’s order, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “advisory,” which also took effect today, seems relatively mild. Yet Chicago’s policy, like New Mexico’s, includes some puzzling judgments.

Lightfoot is urging city residents to stay home as much as possible during the next month, eschew nonessential interstate travel, and avoid gatherings with people outside their households. While outdoor dining at restaurants will continue, gatherings of more than 10 people, whether indoors or outdoors, are banned. But according to the ABC affiliate in Chicago, that limit “does not apply to fitness clubs and retail stores, personal services and movie theaters.” It is hard to see the logic of banning outdoor gatherings of 11 or more people while allowing them inside those businesses.

Likewise, it is hard to see the sense in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new rule requiring businesses with liquor licenses to close at 10 p.m. The New York Times says that “public health experts” view that edict as “a bizarre middle ground.” But it actually seems worse than that, since limiting serving hours is more likely to increase crowding than reduce it. Cuomo also has decreed that no more than 10 people may gather in private residences, without regard to the size of the home or the number of people who live there.

Some American politicians, including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, seem inclined to close primary and secondary schools, which are not important sources of virus transmission, even while allowing indoor dining at restaurants. As the Times notes, that is the opposite of the judgment made by public officials in Europe.

“A mounting body of evidence from across the globe indicates that elementary schools in particular are not the superspreader sites they were once feared to be, though the science is more muddled for older children,” the newspaper says. “Schools have so far been a bright spot for New York. Only .17 percent of tests conducted in over 2,800 schools over the last month came back positive. Several prominent public health experts have come forward in recent weeks to say they are now more confident that schools can reopen safely, as long as they implement strict safety measures and community transmission remains relatively low.”

When there is little rhyme or reason to COVID-19 control measures, politicians should not be surprised by the skepticism and resentment they provoke. Worse, arbitrary legal restrictions may encourage Americans to disregard official advice and resist the voluntary steps that are crucial to reducing virus transmission.

“There is light at the end of the tunnel,” Fauci said on CNN, alluding to the distribution of highly promising vaccines, which is expected to begin next month but probably won’t reach full scale until the spring. “Help is coming. And that should, I believe, motivate people to just say, ‘We are going to double down and do this uniformly.'”

At the same time, Fauci acknowledged that Americans “don’t like to be told what to do” and may be losing patience. “Everyone is sensitive to what we call COVID fatigue,” he said. “People are worn out about this. But we have got to hang in there a bit longer, particularly as we get into the holiday seasons and the colder weather, as we get into the late fall and early winter months.” Every ill-considered, scientifically unsound edict compounds COVID fatigue and makes it less likely that Americans will in fact “hang in there,” let alone “double down.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3nmT6UG
via IFTTT

Here’s “When I Was One-and-Twenty” (1896) by A.E. Housman (1859-1936).

For the rest of my playlist, click here. Past poems are:

1. “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. “The Pulley” by George Herbert
3. “Harmonie du soir” by Charles Baudelaire
4. “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. “Clancy of the Overflow” by A.B. “Banjo” Paterson
6. “Лотова жена” (“Lotova zhena”, “Lot’s wife”) by Anna Akhmatova
7. “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear
8. “The Conqueror Worm” by Edgar Allan Poe
9. “Les Djinns” by Victor Hugo
10. “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” by Alan Seeger

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3f5Pwvl
via IFTTT

One school district in Washington state has evidently decided that Asians no longer qualify as persons of color.

In their latest equity report, administrators at North Thurston Public Schools—which oversees some 16,000 students—lumped Asians in with whites and measured their academic achievements against “students of color,” a category that includes “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students” who have experienced “persistent opportunity gaps.”

Most indicators in the report show that the achievement gap between white/Asian students and “students of color” is fairly narrow and improving over time. It would probably be even narrower if Asian students were categorized as “students of color.” In fact, some indicators might have even shown white students lagging behind that catch-all minority group. Perhaps Asians were included with whites in order to avoid such an outcome. (The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.)

What the equity report really highlights is the absurdities that result from overreliance on semi-arbitrary race-based categories. The report also measured “students of poverty”—those who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches—against non-poverty students, and unsurprisingly found a much more significant achievement gap. Students of poverty perform 28 percent worse on math tests, for instance. That socioeconomic category captures something real and meaningful in a way that the gerrymandered race category does not.

Outside public-school bureaucracies, these kinds of race-based classifications seem less popular than ever. In the 2020 election, California voters decisively rejected Proposition 16, which would have allowed public employees to consider race as a factor in university admissions, employment, contracting, and other decisions. Race-based admissions have been forbidden in the state since 1996, when voters outlawed them via ballot initiative by a margin of 54 percent to 45 percent. Proposition 16, which would have reversed this, lost by an even larger margin, despite receving enthusiastic endorsements from top Democrats in the state.

As The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf notes:

California political and media elites overwhelmingly favored ending race neutrality by passing Prop 16. It was endorsed by Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein; former Senator Barbara Boxer; at least 30 Democratic members of the U.S. House, including Nancy Pelosi; and Governor Gavin Newsom, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, Secretary of State Alex Padilla, State Controller Betty Yee, State Treasurer Fiona Ma, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, Speaker of the Assembly Anthony Rendon, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and hundreds of other local officials. It was also supported by many of the state’s newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, The San Diego Union-Tribune, La Opinión, the East Bay Times, The Sacramento Bee, The Fresno Bee, and The Modesto Bee. And proponents of Prop 16 raised nearly 20 times more money than its opponents.

California is among the bluest of blue states, and yet voters there have decisively rejected the race-based codifications beloved by progressives. As liberals grapple with an election outcome that was less favorable for Democrats than expected, they should bear these things in mind. Proposition 16 was as close a proxy for cultural woke-ism as one could on the ballot this year, and it lost badly.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3nz2MeD
via IFTTT

One of the more bizarre moments of this endlessly weird election season happened yesterday on Fox News, as the cable news network’s hosts and anchors appeared to be operating in completely different versions of reality.

First, Maria Bartiromo dedicated nearly her entire hour-long program to spreading a wild conspiracy theory—born in the fever swamps of a right-wing message board and tweeted by President Donald Trump on Saturday night—that some electronic voting machines had “switched” or “deleted” votes cast for the president.

Rudy Giuliani, who was appointed over the weekend to oversee Trump’s legal efforts contesting the election results, told Bartiromo that he had “proof that I can’t disclose yet” about “corrupt machines.” Separately, Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell joined Bartiromo to proclaim that “Trump won by not just hundreds of thousands of votes, but by millions of votes that were shifted by this software that was designed expressly for that purpose.” There is so much evidence of this fraud, she claimed that “I feel like it is coming in through a fire hose.” Notably, however, neither Powell nor Giuliani offered much of the supposedly readily available evidence.

But the really weird part happened after Bartiromo’s show ended and Fox News anchor Eric Shawn took the helm. After playing a clip of Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, the highest-ranking Republican in the city government, declaring that he had seen no evidence of widespread fraud in the city this year, Shawn took aim at the Dominion conspiracy. “As of today, there is no evidence of any widespread fraud affecting the outcome of the presidential election,” Shawn concluded. “Our precious democracy was not tampered with.”

The Trump years have created some obvious tensions between the opinionated hosts of Fox News’ programs and the network’s team of reporters and anchors who are tasked with delivering facts. But the divide has never seemed as stark as in the days since the election. The Sean Hannitys and Maria Bartiromos of the Fox News universe have raced to promote increasingly outrageous theories about the results—appealing to the favor of their number one biggest fan and giving false hope to his legions of followers—while the news division has dutifully reported that the president lost and that his myriad legal challenges of the results have been mostly meritless and quickly dismissed.

Must watch!

After Maria Bartiromo devoted her entire show this morning to promoting Trump's Dominion conspiracy, Fox News anchor Eric Shawn debunks it and other voter fraud claims, declaring that "such baseless and false claims are an insult" to election officials and workers. pic.twitter.com/ksM2hGIJqn

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) November 15, 2020

While the reporters and news anchors are getting their information from official sources like city commissioners and election officials at all levels of government, the Dominion conspiracy theory seems to have originated with a false claim made anonymously on a pro-Trump website. It rose quickly through the less trustworthy parts of the right-wing mediasphere until it caught the president’s attention.

In an all-caps tweet on Saturday night, Trump highlighted a report from One America News Network (OANN), a right-wing outlet, that claimed voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had “switched” more than 200,000 votes from Trump to Biden and “deleted” another 900,000 Trump votes. That made it a story worthy of being covered by Trump’s symbiotes at Fox News and elsewhere.

It is, to be clear, completely unsubstantiated.

The OANN report that Trump tweeted claimed that “data obtained from Edison Research,” a polling firm, proved the allegations. But Edison Research has published no such report and has no data suggesting anything like that, the company’s president told The Dispatch. 

Furthermore, Dominion Voting Systems has told the Associated Press that they have no evidence of “any vote switching or alleged software issues with our voting systems.” And Edward Perez, global director of technology for the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that monitors elections around the world, told The New York Times that the group has seen no evidence of problems with Dominion voting machines that would cause votes to be recorded incorrectly.

The few instances of “irregularities” in vote counts that lend the slightest whiff of believability to things like the Dominion conspiracy seem to fall apart upon closer scrutiny. In Michigan, for example, mistakes that election officials said were “human error” led to some results changing as those slips were identified and fixed. A viral tweet that showed Biden suddenly gaining 138,000 votes in Michigan while Trump gained none was the result of a glitch in the reporting system, not the result of vote counting issues. The numbers were quickly corrected. And, as Republican officials in Michigan reminded The New York Times over the weekend, election results are certified only after a bipartisan group of canvassers double-check the vote count in every county.

To be fair, conservatives do not have a monopoly on spreading misleading allegations about corrupt voting machines. After the 2016 election, there was widespread speculation, mostly on the political left, that Russian hackers may have infiltrated voting systems to nudge the results toward Trump—just one part of the even wilder theories about Trump’s status as an alleged Russian agent. It was true that the Obama administration had caught Russia-based attempts at hacking voter information, but a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2019 found no evidence that hackers had attempted to alter vote counts.

The main difference, this time, is that the president is actively encouraging and spreading these stories. Even though we should all know better by now, that does lend a degree of seriousness to debunked theories that should not be taken seriously until we see some of that “fire hose” of evidence that’s always kept just out of sight.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3lFLlZE
via IFTTT